You're Welcome

About an hour ago, i saw You're Welcome, a series of five "bad plays," and for a variety of reasons, it was an extremely enjoyable production. The first of these is of course that we've also been learning about proper play structure in class and through the reverse psychology exercise of writing our own purposefully bad plays to learn from our mistakes, similarly to how You're Welcome ultimately played out as a strategy guide for inexperienced playwrights and directors. Another is that the second play was not in fact a play, but a single extended stage direction that narrated a suspenseful monster truck race. Yet another was that there was an aged, balding hipster laughing very loudly sitting in the row in front of me, sometimes slapping the leg of his awkward, more silent friend. Thanks to information I gained from casually eavesdropping on this friend, I was able to deduce that his name was Stephen (not certain if spelled with an ph or a v).

There were three main actors, along with several stage hands, and several of the plays were repeatedly interrupted by the director walking on stage for whatever reason, and the plays frequently touched upon what seemed like a kind of theme, a warning that on-stage hubris, in the form of expensive props or over the top direction styles, is ultimately quite detrimental to the play's integrity. I guess that's a fancy way of saying that I felt there was a certain sub-contextual message in the plays. At any rate, everything that was meant to parody something was taken to professional, well-planned extents that our bad plays could never reach, and it was hilarious to see such plays being preformed in actuality.